Food Production and Quality of Diet in China

As always, the question of food sufficiency in the People's Republic of China is important, fascinating and difficult to answer. After China's reopening to the Western world in the early 1970s, it was answered affirmatively by both the Chinese and the first foreign observers. To give just one example in each of these categories, China's Vice Minister of Agriculture assured the delegates at the United Nations World Food Conference in Rome in November 1974 that his country possessed adequate food for everyone;I and a Harvard nutrition expert wrote after a brief visit in 1975 that even during the bad harvests from 1959 to 1961 famines were avoided by careful distribution to the neediest ones.' '2 In the absence of both demographic data and food production statistics, it was difficult to offer a realistic appraisal. But even the fragmentary information, when systematically collected and critically evaluated, was sufficient to conclude, as I did after preparing food balance sheets for 1957 and 1974 and comparing them with the most likely requirements, that hardly any improvement had taken place in average Chinese per capita food consumption between 1957 (the last year of regularly published statistics) and 1974. It was evident that the typical Chinese diet, while not implying chronic massive malnutrition, did not provide any safety margin either.3 Soon afterwards these conclusions were abundantly confirmed by the flood of new Chinese statistics, which were released as part of the ruling party's reformist promise to seek the truth from the facts

Agricultural economics · Biology · Business · China · Economics · Food processing · Food quality · Geography · Production (economics) · Quality (philosophy) · Food Science · Nutrition, Health, and Society Studies

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  Open Access•James Simpson•Revista de Historia Económica /…•1989

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